Wednesday, April 6, 2011

In my garden...

I've just been down in the hollow putting sticking plaster on a few holes in the polytunnel. It has its own special type of sticking plaster - like a very thick sellotape. For the last couple of years I've been expecting to have to get new plastic on the tunnel - it's past its ten-year life expectancy - but it keeps on going. And now it has wondrous new doors. When it was new Joe fixed roll-down plastic to the openings at each end, but they were made from ordinary polythene that disintegrated in the sunlight. So I've had wind-break fabric only. Now I have this set of splendid doors:

I'll be able to plant out the tomatoes much earlier than in previous years. Well, I will when the roll-down polythene is attached to the other end. We have the polytunnel plastic and I have a Mr Fix-It who's going to do it this weekend as long as it doesn't piss down the whole time.

Finally everything is going green. There's a haze on the trees in the valley. The whitethorn is in leaf (except most of the new ones I planted - hope they're not dead) and the apple tree buds are bursting. Heard the first Willow Warbler and Blackcap today from the haggard and Joe saw a swallow flying over. Not one of 'our' swallows though - just passing through, reminding itself of the terrain, checking what's changed since last year.

The wood anemones are in full flower.

And there's so many small plants to the square foot. Here we've violet, barren strawberry, lesser stitchwort and pignut. Pignut is an interesting one - it's the feathery leaves in the photo. If you dig it up - which the badgers regularly do (and presumably pigs) - you'll find small little nuts underground. It is these edible roots that people were gathering in May:

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About Me

Two blogs now.
Floating Boater is mostly about our life on the waterways of Ireland on Winter Solstice, our timber cruiser. She's a Rampart 32 built in 1969 in Southampton. She was one of the last this size to come out of the Rampart boatyard – plastic was the material of the future. So a classic but with a definite sixties bent.
Every summer we take off on the astonishingly varied waterways of Ireland and enter another, sweeter world. In between I tend my vegetables, look after our acre or so of garden in East Clare, write poetry, and teach and play flute. I occasionally have to do other paid work too.
We're on the move from our present house and I have a new acre to begin. So Mucky Fingernails is the gardening wing. It's a record of the creation of a new garden, starting from an open field.